Thomas on Women's History in the Abortion Wars

“Without known exception, the early American
feminists condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms.” This
claim about women’s history has been used by pro-life advocates for
twenty years to control the political narrative of abortion.
Conservatives, led by the group Feminists for Life, have used feminist
icons from history to support their anti-abortion advocacy. Federal
anti-abortion legislation has been named after feminist heroines, like
the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnancy and Parenting Students Act
(co-sponsored by Rick Santorum) and the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick
Douglass Act of 2011. Amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court quote
women’s rights leaders in support of abortion regulation and political
forums popularize the notion. This political narrative, however,
misconstrues the historical evidence. It invents rather than describes
history, blatantly ignoring the text, context, and spirit of the work of
the women it appropriates.

The need to create a history of anti-abortion feminists seems
important today because abortion has come to be equated with women’s
rights. The appeal to historical figures in the abortion debate is
powerful because it utilizes the gravitas of feminist heroines to
challenge the existing legal and political assumption that abortion is a
cornerstone of sex equality. The appeal to feminist history by pro-life
advocates offers a counter narrative in which women dedicated to
improving the economic and educational rights of women reject abortion
as a gender-based right. The lack of popular knowledge about the lives
and ideologies of these women leaders contributes to the ease and
utility of co-opting their images for political purposes.

This Article tests the veracity of the political and legal claims of
a feminist history against abortion by focusing on Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, “the brilliant chief philosopher and leader” of the
nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. Stanton has quite literally
been the poster child for FFL’s historical campaign against abortion,
appearing on posters, flyers, and commemorative coffee mugs. This
research offers a detailed account of Stanton’s views related to
abortion based on original historical research into the archives of
Stanton’s papers. Like other works of legal history, it is fundamentally
concerned with recovering all of the legally relevant facts and placing
those facts in appropriate historical and legal context.

The evidence shows that Stanton did not talk about abortion per se.
She did not respond to the public campaign for the criminalization of
abortion led by the medical profession with attacks on the growing
autonomy of women. Instead Stanton turned this debate to her priority of
women’s rights, framing the question as one of the “elevation of woman”
through equal legal and social rights. Stanton’s theory of “enlightened
motherhood” placed women as the “sovereign of her own person” with sole
responsibility for deciding when and under what circumstances to bear
children. She defended women accused of infanticide, exposing the
gendered legal system of all-male juries, legislatures, and judges that
condemned them. Stanton’s life work labored for radical change to the
patriarchy of society seeking liberal legal reforms of equal rights for
women. Her ideology was about the “self-sovereignty” of women and
against the regulation of women by men or the law. Stanton thus makes an
unlikely spokesperson for the modern anti-abortion movement committed
to opposite ends.